Minnesota Nice is a not so flattering term that refers to a certain passive aggressiveness among the state’s residents, a tendency to complain about things that bug us, but we do everything we can to avoid direct conflict.
I thought of this after reading a story this morning in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. The article doesn’t directly concern doctors, but it does speak to a culture that tolerates professional misconduct or incompetence very much present in healthcare.
Education reporters Emily Johns and Norman Draper’s impressive work documents how bad teachers in Minnesota rarely get fired. Since 1992, only 10 Minnesota teachers fired for poor performance have challenged their dismissals all the way through that process, the Star Tribune reports.
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Rather than endure an expensive and contentious dismissal process, school districts instead turn to a patchwork of other methods to try to remove low-performing teachers. Those include paying them off or “counseling them out.”
In January, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave Minnesota an “F” in “exiting ineffective teachers” on its annual report card on state teacher policies. The council also cited the state as one of 23 having no state policy for getting rid of bad teachers.
We also don’t like to punish cops. Another Strib story, written by City Hall reporter Steve Brandt, showed how Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan imposed discipline in just four of the 24 police misconduct cases sustained and forwarded to him by the city’s Civilian Review Authority last year. In 2008, he didn’t impose discipline in any of the five cases the CRA forwarded after investigating and agreeing with citizens’ complaints.
Why does all of this sound familiar?
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Last month, Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader, released a stinging report that calls Minnesota the worst state in the nation in punishing wayward docs. From 2007 to 2009, Minnesota issued only 1.07 serious disciplinary actions (revocations, surrenders, suspensions and probation/restrictions) per 1,000 physicians, the fewest in the United States, according to the report.
Of the 139 discipline orders issued from 2007 to 2008, the board only once revoked a doctor’s license.
Now teachers, police officers and doctors are completely different professions, but the one thing they do seem to have in common is job security in Minnesota. That two national reports ranked the state dead last in disciplining poor performance among two of our most trusted professions should give people pause.
A lawyer for the Minnesota Medical Association says the state medical board issues more “Agreements for Corrective Action” than any other state. Such agreements, not included in the Public Citizen report, are far more effective in correcting poor performance than discipline, she said.
Educate Minnesota, the teachers union, blames school administrators and principals for not spotting troubled teachers soon enough.
Both union reps may be right. But that’s one-half of the equation. Identifying and helping wayward docs, cops and teachers to improve is a matter of fairness and good policy. Yet, the lack of any accountability breeds a culture that tolerates misconduct to a fault. You need a velvet glove AND a hammer. Otherwise, all you have is a velvet glove.
There’s something else at work here. I’m not completely sure it’s about helping teachers, cops and doctors improve, but rather an extreme aversion to conflict or worse, laziness. We would just rather not deal with the headache and expense of removing bad cops, teachers and doctors. And the ultimate losers are students and patients.
Suddenly, Minnesota Nice doesn’t seem so nice after all.
